Sárközi Ildikó Gyöngyvér - Sirin Mama nyugati hadjárata avagy egy istennő születésének csodás history

The book the reader is holding is about a little nomadic girl named Sirin. This little girl acquires miraculous abilities with the help of an ancient immortal, then goes to war in place of her parents to defeat three bandit chieftains who torment the tribes of the grassy steppes. However, his story does not end with his victory over the bandit leaders. Sirin undertakes to return the children who were previously kidnapped but freed during the fighting to their parents. This is how Mama Sirin gets the honorable name and becomes the worshiped deity of a handful of people living in China, the Shibes: the protector of children and families. The book is therefore the story of the birth of a goddess, which is also part of the spiritual cultural heritage left to us by the Sibes.

The story of Mama Sirin's western campaign is due to a Shibe man from Northeast China, He Junyou (1924-2012). Gyöngyvér Ildikó Sárközi's translation with an introductory study and notes puts his legacy into shape in Hungarian. The translation is made special by the fact that Gyöngyvér Sárközi Ildikó spent more than half a decade in China as an ethnologist, visiting the regions inhabited by the Sibes; and although he could not meet the old storyteller, he participated in the sacrifices presented to Mama Sirin in several places and heard the stories about him. In his translation, he also tried to evoke the atmosphere in which he himself experienced these meetings.

GYONGYVÉR SÁRKÖZI ILDIKÓ is a research associate at the BTK Institute of Ethnography, assistant professor at the Chinese Department of the Institute of Oriental Languages ​​and Cultures of the KRE BTK. Since 2010, he has been conducting fieldwork among the Chinese Shibs. His main field of research is the investigation of nation-building and inheritance processes.